Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
As 2013 begins to draw to a close, I thought it would be nice to finish off the year with a final article that’s an overview of what has happened at the ITSM Review over the last 12 months. That’s right, this will be our last post for 2013 because the entire team is heading off to fill their faces with mince pies and sherry. But don’t worry we’ll be back...

“A man who chases two rabbits catches none.”
Regular readers of my blog on The ITSM Review, or over at ScrumProUK know that I enjoy exploring the gap between the worlds of IT Service Management and Agile development methodologies.
Today I wanted to go back to basics, back to square one and start over by explaining why you – as a reader from the world of Service Management or corporate IT...

There have been many hundreds of words recently written on the subject of Agile Development and IT Operations practices. For the average ITSM practitioner, however, a life where both are interwoven into the organisations day-to-day work seems as unattainable as ever.
Sure, you might work for one of the few organisations that practices DevOps. If so congratulations… you’re one of the cool...

Persona: "the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others"
During my time in IT Service Management I’ve read my fair share of process and policy documentation. In fact, I think I’ve had the misfortune to read more than my fair share.
Process documentation is important, don’t get me wrong. Without someone taking the time to write down the intention,...

Those who have worked in IT Operations have a strong affinity with the skills of problem solving and troubleshooting. Although a huge amount of effort is taken to improve resiliency and redundancy of IT systems the ability to quickly diagnose the root cause of problems has never been more important and relevant.
IT Service Management has gone a long way towards making practices standardised and repeatable....

KEDB - a repository that describes all of the conditions in your IT systems that might result in an incident for your customers.
I was wondering – do you have a Known Error Database? And are you getting the maximum value out of it?
The concept of a KEDB is interesting to me because it is easy to see how it benefits end users. Also because it is dynamic and constantly updated.
Most of all because...

One of the outcomes of IT Service Management is the regulation, consistency and predictability in the delivery of services.
I remember working in IT before Service Management was adopted by our organisation and realising that we would over-service some customers and under-service others. Not intentionally but we didn’t have a way of regulating our work and making our output predicatable.
Our...

Do regular processes go out of the window during a Major Incident?
Recently I’ve been working on Incident Management, and specifically on Major Incident planning.
During my time in IT Operations I saw teams handle Major Incidents in a number of different ways. I actually found that in some cases all process and procedure went out of the window during a Major Incident, which has a horrible irony...

Ignoring the obvious may lead to a nasty mess
I found Simon Morris via his remarkably useful ITIL in 140 app. Simon recently joined ServiceNow from a FTSE100 Advertising, Marketing and Communications group. He was Head of Operations and Engineering and part of a team that lead the Shared Services IT organisation through its transition to IT Service Management process implementation. Here, Simon kindly...